To whatever extent possible, I'd like to buy a large number of general purpose boxen that can be reasonably pressed into service for a variety of configurations, rather than trying to overspecify what we are going to do and buy machines that are highly specific to those purposes.
My thinking is that we will be needing N general boxen to do load balancing/squid/apache and then also email and dns on separate machines too I think, and 2 specialized boxes to be database servers. We have one very good machine (when it's fixed!) to be our database server. We will want another one that's not quite as expensive but which would be reasonably capable of serving as a backup unit. If the general profile that we are buying is capable of doing that, then great. If not, then at least one machine is going to have to be special.
Does that sound sensible?
--Jimbo
On Thu, 08 Jan 2004 04:42:51 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
To whatever extent possible, I'd like to buy a large number of general purpose boxen that can be reasonably pressed into service for a variety of configurations, rather than trying to overspecify what we are going to do and buy machines that are highly specific to those purposes.
My thinking is that we will be needing N general boxen to do load balancing/squid/apache
From my information it would be very good if the Apaches would be all the
same size as it would simplify the load balancing a lot. I guess those mainly need cpu, i'm not shure about hd. How are the images/media stored at the moment? NFS? I think the apaches could be pretty cheap machines- more cheap ones might buy more power than fewer high-end ones. I don't see the need for a separate load balancer right now, but if we need one the same machine as the Apaches would be fine. The squid boxes should have a lot of ram (4Gb if possible) to cut hd usage and one processor. All frequently accessed pages and images should fit into ram.
and then also email and dns on separate machines too I think,
This might be a good use for one of the current machines.
Gabriel Wicke
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